


where i like to stand

by hamletcat



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-12
Updated: 2021-02-12
Packaged: 2021-03-12 13:26:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29385534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hamletcat/pseuds/hamletcat
Summary: in which lan fan is happy for him.
Relationships: Lan Fan/Ling Yao
Comments: 3
Kudos: 16





	where i like to stand

**Author's Note:**

> apologizing in advance i promise to let them be happy together eventually

He changes behind a silk screen, and Lan Fan stands before it, eyes scanning the room with repetitive motion. She is the only one he trusts with his bare back, as she has trusted him in the past with unshielded arms and the knives in her belt.

She is grateful when he ties the sash at the back of his wedding robe by himself. He asks for her help, sometimes- or he used to, before. 

She doesn't think she could do it today, and he understands without a word passing between them, because that is what Ling does. He knows her better than anyone, by the roll of her shoulders and the way she blinks when she's irritated.

He's getting married today, and Lan Fan is not angry.

She's known about it her whole life. It's the Xingese way, and she loves Xing; she is a child of it, a servant to it. She cannot be angry at the practice of the Emperor.

Above all else, she's proud of him. After everything that happened so he could get here, she's happy. More than anything, she's happy. 

She's never been happier, she tells herself. Her best friend- her lord- is getting married today. 

His first wedding; forty-nine to go.

Lan Fan jams her eyes closed for a moment- happy tears, she reminds herself, because how could she be sad today?- and breathes in deeply. In, two, three, four. Hold. Exhale.

She's proud of him.

His wife, soon to be Empress consort, is a woman of the Chao clan. 

She has refined features, a narrow nose and an angular face. Her hands are graceful. Lan Fan has never seen her with dirt or grease smeared on her cheek. She is Lan Fan's polar opposite.

She's seen the way the woman looks at Ling; amicably, without much passion. It's clear she does not want to marry him, but the two of them enjoy one another's company. Lan Fan knows that they will come to be good friends, maybe fall in love over time. Ling says that's how it's supposed to be, when he speaks to a nearly-empty room like there's no one there. She cannot answer, but he tells her that Emperors do not marry for love, they marry for companionship. They marry for Xing. 

There are words that hang in the air between them in that room, a daisy chain looping around his fingers, reaching her up in the rafters. It sits there like an unwelcome guest, staring expectantly, waiting for one of them to address it. Dismiss it. 

Neither of them will. They fear the aftermath; flower petals on the floor.

There are footsteps outside, and a resounding knock.

With a sidelong glance at the rest of the room, Lan Fan stalks to the threshold and opens the door to reveal one of the Emperor's servants in his finest clothes. "The ceremony starts in ten minutes," he says, looking slightly terrified of Lan Fan. She often forgets that the palace servants view her as a living legend, the quarter-metal soldier that sacrificed everything to get their Emperor on top. 

Suffice it to say, she does not have many friends.

"Thank you," she says simply, and it comes out like a snap. She can practically see the man quivering. Lan Fan shuts the door to avoid embarrassing herself further.

"Ten minutes, my lord," she tells him. It's quiet. He hears her anyway.

"Thanks, Lan Fan."

She doesn't answer. He doesn't keep talking like he usually would to dissipate the silence, which always makes him squirm.

Lan Fan stands there, in the center of the room, and tries not to feel jealous of the Chao noblewoman.

She is happy, she reminds herself, for the thousandth time that day. She is proud of him. 

This will solidify his throne, and he deserves a companion who is his equal, politically and mentally. She will come to know him, and she will love him as everyone who knows him does. She will learn the smallest of his quirks; how too-hot water makes him shiver, and he doesn't like vegetarian dumplings, and chocolate makes his stomach hurt.

Lan Fan is not a princess. Her father was not a wealthy merchant, and her mother not descended from kings. She does not understand political action, or war tactics, or how to hold a fan to convey her social status. She was not built to marry an Emperor.

Not that she wants to.

She is proud of him. She keeps telling herself so, and she hopes that if she says it enough she will begin to believe it.

Deep down, she knows she loves him. She doesn't know if she can love anyone else. 

He is the foremost object of her heart; the man she dedicated her life to, not in word, but in action. She has come to terms with it. The thought does not make her blush. The idea of him marrying someone else no longer makes her want to cry. Not really.

She knows she will protect the Empress; she will protect Ling's child.

It's what she was born to do. What she lost her arm for, and lost her childhood, and lost Fu because this is how she is supposed to be. She was raised to be numb because there is no other way a bodyguard can behave. There is no room for irrationality in her line of work. No room to love your charge.

He steps out from behind the screen, yellow robes weighing heavy like sin and dragging his thin face down. His hair is mostly loose and silky-straight, pulled back partially into a bun and adorned with an ornate pin. "Do I look ready to get married?" he teases, and there is a hint of hesitation in his speech.

She nods without speaking, and something flashes in his eyes that Lan Fan aches too much to decode. 

He looks like something from a painting. He looks like the heroes from storybooks; he looks like the one that wins in the end, because everything will, impossibly, go his way.

She clenches her fists and averts her eyes as he passes her; that is what custom dictates.

Besides, she cannot take his searching gaze, begging her for a flicker of something that she will not let him have.

She follows him to the door. He pauses, hand on the doorknob.

"Is this a good idea?" he asks her, his voice barely a whisper. There are guards stationed outside.

When he looks at her, he is looking for the friend of his childhood; the kid that bandaged his right knee when he scraped it so badly that he cried, the teenager that followed him to the rooftops with stolen pastries in hand, sitting so high up that Fu couldn't see them.

Lan Fan sees it reflected in his expression, and chooses instead to be his servant, as she always should have been. It would have been better if she ignored him from the start; lived to serve rather than to love.

Things would have been easier that way.

"Of course it is, my lord," she lies through her teeth. "I congratulate you."

He smiles half-heartedly, and he reaches out on reflex because sometimes, he will touch her and it feels like floating. 

His knuckles brush her wrist.

For the first time, she recoils, and he meets her with a thinly-veiled wince.

They do not exchange another word- how do you recover from something like that? Something like this?- and Ling leaves her behind. 

The door shuts with a finality that Lan Fan is unfamiliar with.

She likes open-ended finales. She likes when the conclusion is ambiguous; when you don't know who lived, who died. What happens after.

There have been too many complete endings of late.

He will bring his questions of morality to his wife, instead.

She understands that this is it. This is curtains closed, on their friendship, on the loosely-locked hands in the Xerxian desert and the quiet intimacy in the Ishvalan settlement tents, him watching as she wrapped her wrist with tight bandages to heal the sprain she got during the Amestrian frays.

He does not have to say a word. The ending is not up to interpretation.

She wishes it didn't hurt so badly. She wonders if her conscience would let her quit her job, find work elsewhere, seek solace beneath other skies.

Lan Fan knows her mind won't let her stray far from this palace, from her lord's side.

She will handle this, as she has handled all the other pain in the past. She compartmentalizes because it's easy. She takes the coward's way out and ignores the feeling because she has to serve him. She has to be better than she is now.

She watches his wedding from the rafters and does not applaud when it's over, both because her position does not allow it and because he looks up at her, his wife's hand in his, and gives her the saddest smile she's seen in all her life before he turns away.

Lan Fan chooses to feel nothing. That is the simple route. When Ling kisses the Empress' cheek, her stomach twists. 

She is disgusted by herself.


End file.
